My Dear Departed
by Lilah.Frost
Summary: A letter from a lonely Jennifer Sullivan-Cox to a ghost.


So I have no idea how to start this thing, what is the formal way to address a dead guy? Do I have to tell you who I am, or are you floating somewhere over my shoulder, watching me write this and laughing at my stupidity? Well for literary equivalency, I shall introduce myself, but I even manage to make that complicated. I get Little JD from people at the hospital, Jennifer Dylan from mom, Jenji from Elliot, Jen-Dizzle from Izzy and Sam and, of course, Dad calls me Jennybug.

I wonder what you would call me.

I have to say, I think you're an ass. I've heard your cancer story, though not from mom and dad, and if you hadn't been so stupid and in denial, you wouldn't have broken them so much. Why didn't you just see a doctor when you went away? Too busy taking out of focus pictures of your face?

Yes, I know, the heart thing, nothing they could do, I get it.

I'm still allowed to hate you for not being here.

Yeah, I know it's not really fair given that you have no right of reply, but if you were me, you'd hate you too and ranting at someone you never even knew wouldn't seem so crazy. I think even I know this whole exercise is a bit crazy, but that's what shrinks do, make you do crazy shit like write letters to annoying dead guys. I plan on hiding this in a place no one will ever find it. God I hope no one finds this.

Jack would have a field day if he were to get his hands on it, he's not great when it comes to academic stuff, but he's the king of witty repartee and comebacks, a genius when it comes to mockery. I can see just how the argument would go; he would tease me about you, I'd hit back with a jab about his ridiculous hair-maintenance schedule, he would take a dig at my (non) relationship with Sam, I would shove the whole letter deep into his esophageus…

From what I've heard about you, you would probably just laugh at our fights, so much like you and mom when you were kids.

And after you were kids.

I wonder what you would make of this, the so called happy family that is Sacred Heart hospital, where everyone is someone's uncle, aunt, godfather, surrogate father figure when your dad is a drunken rageaholic with an ego the size of Texas… And I guess for a fake family they do ok, it was always far less embarrassing to show of my new dance steps to JD and Turk than to Dad, who I swear to god did a victory lap of the hospital when I announced I wanted to play football instead. Big JD totally cried. I wonder what you would have thought of that. You probably would have told me to stick with the creative stuff, given it's the safer option for eternally clumsy people. Which reminds me, thanks for allowing me to inherit your grace and finesse; I really love my daily routine of falling down every set of stairs I come across. It's just one of the many things I apparently inherited from you, like your ability to actually make dad laugh in the middle of one of his tangents, your taste for tequila and hatred of scotch (Dad HATES you for that by the way) and, most painfully for mom, your smile. She wouldn't admit it to anyone, but I've seen the way she tears up when anyone sees a photo of you and points it out, she once told me that our smile was special because it spread to our whole face, and when it reached our eyes other people couldn't help but smile too. She only ever gets mushy like that when she talks about you, it doesn't happen as much these days.

When it comes to understanding people there's only so much you can see in pictures, they're so forced and posed and fake, but in your Polaroids, I can see so much more. Corny I know, but it has amazed me since I was little that you could tell so much from a simple photo.

I still carry that one of mom and dad at the hospital in my wallet.

Big JD's the only one that really talks to me about you anymore, even though he didn't know you for that long, it's obvious you had an impact on him. He tells me all the legendary stories he heard from before that time; college pranks and overnight stays in jail and, of course, your camera that now sits on my bookshelf next to Dad's old med-school copy of Gray's Anatomy.

Dad doesn't know that I've decided to be a doctor yet, I'm probably not gonna tell him for a while. Besides I want to travel first, go to all the places you visited before you left. I might not even practice medicine here, I might go to Australia or Somalia or something.

I'll probably go into oncology.

I don't really know why I don't want to tell anyone, I mean, Izzy's already announced her intentions of becoming a nurse, it wouldn't exactly shock them. Maybe that's the point, maybe I wish I could have surprised them, done the unexpected.

This kind of brings me to why I'm writing this, aside from the shrink's heavy 'suggestions' to do so. Sacred Heart has been my life for 17 years, I'm surrounded by all these people who love and care for me, my family is like, 100 people and they're always around. But I'm lonely, and I wish you were here. Jackie's so entirely Dad, Sammy is the spitting image of Big JD, Izzy is a mini-Carla and Nicky is so much like his uncle Marco it makes Turk cry. They all have someone, their counterpart who helps them and guides them and tells them what to do and I feel like my person should be you. But you're not here.

I'm forever compared to a ghost, told how I remind them all of you. I think it frightens Mom a bit.

I think sometimes when they look at me, they see only you. I feel so stupid for feeling such girly things, for feeling so alone. Maybe if you weren't such an ass you would have listened to someone, realised sooner, been here.

How the hell do you miss someone you never even met?


End file.
